


IT finds you

by aloissssxo



Category: IT - Stephen King, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Gen, Horror, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:27:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17353778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aloissssxo/pseuds/aloissssxo
Summary: "When you're with us, you'll float too"-Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do is just an ordinary town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part, a good place to live.It is a group of children who see - and feel - what makes Andong so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurks, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread. Sometimes IT appears as an evil clown named Pennywise and sometimes IT reaches up, seizing, tearing, killing...Time passes and the children grow up, move away and forget. Until they are called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirs and coils in the sullen depths of their memories, engaging again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.-ALL RIGHTS GO TO STEPHEN KING, I HAVE ONLY CHANGED SEX'S, NAMES, LOCATION, PRONOUNS AND OCCASIONAL TERMS/WORDING. THIS IS FAN-FICTION FOR BTS FANS WHO WOULD LIKE A REWRITE OF THE ORIGINAL WITH BTS INVOLVED





	1. Chapter 1 - AFTER THE FLOOD (1957)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello guys!  
> I recently got feedback that I should post my wattpad works on AO3, and so I have decided to try it out. I am still unfamiliar with the layout so I apologise for that, but I will do my best to upload my work from wattpad to here regularly. The delays may be slow though since wattpad updating is my priority and I have a lot to write.   
> I hope you enjoy my re-imagine of the novel IT by Stephen King, I take no credit from this book except from the stuff mentioned in the description of the book. If you would like to keep up better with my books (re-imagines and original work) you can find it on my wattpad which is the exact same as my username on here).  
> I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Please point out if there are any mistakes with my editing since I may miss areas to edit with names etc. Please let me know in the comments but don't bombard me!   
> I would love it if you left me some feedback and comments. It keeps me going and motivates me!
> 
> Enjoy~

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down 30-3 Danwon-ro toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Danron-ro and Unan-dong. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Andong had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy's slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof... a comfortable, almost cozy sound. The boy in the yellow slicker was Jeon Jeongguk. He was six. His brother, Taehyung, known to most of the kids at Andong Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Tae, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Tae was ten years old.

Tae had made the boat beside which Jeongguk now ran. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows, while their mother played Fur Elise on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.

About three-quarters of the way down the block as one headed toward the intersection and the dead traffic light, Danwon-ro was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and four orange sawhorses. Stencilled across each of the horses was ANDONG DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfuls-all of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street's surface were boating through the intersection of Unan-dong and Danwon-ro like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Andong had begun to make nervous jokes about arks. The Public Works Department had managed to keep Unan-dong open, but Danwon-ro was impassable from the sawhorses all the way to the center of town.

But, everyone agreed, the worst was over. The Kenduskeag Stream had crested just below its banks in the Barrens and bare inches below the concrete sides of the Canal which channelled it tightly as it passed through downtown. Right now a gang of men- Jeon Sunghoon, Jeongguk and Taehyung's father, among them-were removing the sandbags they had thrown up the day before with such panicky haste. Yesterday overflow and expensive flood damage had seemed almost inevitable. God knew it had happened before-the flooding in 1931 had been a disaster which had cost millions of dollars and almost two dozen lives. That was a long time ago, but there were still enough people around who remembered it to scare the rest. One of the flood victims had been found twenty-five miles east, in Unheung-dong. The fish had eaten this unfortunate gentleman's eyes, three of his fingers, his penis, and most of his left foot. Clutched in what remained of his hands had been a Ford steering wheel.

Now, though, the river was receding, and when the new Bangor Hydro dam went in upstream, the river would cease to be a threat. Or so said Jeon Sunghoon, who worked for Bangor Hydroelectric. As for the rest-well, future floods could take care of themselves. The thing was to get through this one, to get the power back on, and then to forget it. In Andong such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was almost an art, as Jeon Taehyung would come to discover in the course of time.

Jeongguk paused just beyond the sawhorses at the edge of a deep ravine that had been cut through the tar surface of Danwon-ro. This ravine ran on an almost exact diagonal. It ended on the far side of the street, roughly forty feet farther down the hill from where he now stood, on the right. He laughed aloud-the sound of solitary, childish glee a bright runner in that gray afternoon-as a vagary of the flowing water took his paper boat into a scale-model rapids which had been formed by the break in the tar. The urgent water had cut a channel which ran along the diagonal, and so his boat travelled from one side of Danwon-ro to the other, the current carrying it so fast that Jeongguk had to sprint to keep up with it. Water sprayed out from beneath his galoshes in muddy sheets. Their buckles made a jolly jingling as Jeon Jeongguk ran toward his strange death. And the feeling which filled him at that moment was clear and simple love for his brother Taehyung... love and a touch of regret that Taehyung couldn't be here to see this and be a part of it. Of course he would try to describe it to Taehyung when he got home, but he knew he wouldn't be able to make Taehyung see it, the way Taehyung would have been able to make him see it if their positions had been reversed. Taehyung was good at reading and writing, but even at his age Jeongguk was wise enough to know that wasn't the only reason why Taehyung got all A's on his report cards, or why his teachers liked his compositions so well. Telling was only part of it. Taehyung was good at seeing.

The boat nearly whistled along the diagonal channel, just a page torn from the Classified section of the Andong News, but now Jeongguk imagined it as a FT boat in a war movie, like the ones he sometimes saw down at the Andong Theater with Taehyung at Saturday matinees. A war picture with Choi Minsik fighting the Japs. The prow of the newspaper boat threw sprays of water to either side as it rushed along, and then it reached the gutter on the left side of Danwon-ro. A fresh streamlet rushed over the break in the tar at this point, creating a fairly large whirlpool, and it seemed to him that the boat must be swamped and capsize. It leaned alarmingly, and then Jeongguk cheered as it righted itself, turned, and went racing on down toward the intersection. Jeongguk sprinted to catch up. Over his head, a grim gust of October wind rattled the trees, now almost completely unburdened of their freight of colored leaves by the storm, which had been this year a reaper of the most ruthless sort.


	2. Chapter 2

Sitting up in bed, his cheeks still flushed with heat (but his fever, like the Kenduskeag, finally receding), Taehyung had finished the boat-but when Jeongguk reached for it, Bill held it out of reach. "N-Now get me the p-p-paraffin."

"What's that? Where is it?"

"It's on the cellar shuh-shuh-shelf as you go d-downstairs," Taehyung said. "In a box that says Guh-Guh-hulf... Gulf. Bring that to me, and a knife, and a b-bowl. And a puh-pack of muh-muh-matches."

Jeongguk had gone obediently to get these things. He could hear his mother playing the piano, not Fur Elise now but something else he didn't like so well-something that sounded dry and fussy; he could hear rain flicking steadily against the kitchen windows. These were comfortable sounds, but the thought of the cellar was not a bit comfortable. He did not like the cellar, and he did not like going down the cellar stairs, because he always imagined there was something down there in the dark. That was silly, of course, his father said so and his mother said so and, even more important, Taehyung said so, but still -

He did not even like opening the door to flick on the light because he always had the idea-this was so exquisitely stupid he didn't dare tell anyone-that while he was feeling for the light switch, some horrible clawed paw would settle lightly over his wrist... and then jerk him down into the darkness that smelled of dirt and wet and dim rotted vegetables.

Stupid! There were no things with claws, all hairy and full of killing spite. Every now and then someone went crazy and killed a lot of people-sometimes Jang Woosung told about such things on the evening news-and of course there were Commies, but there was no weirdo monster living down in their cellar. Still, this idea lingered. In those interminable moments while he was groping for the switch with his right hand (his left arm curled around the doorjamb in a deathgrip), that cellar smell seemed to intensify until it filled the world. Smells of dirt and wet and long-gone vegetables would merge into one unmistakable ineluctable smell, the smell of the monster, the apotheosis of all monsters. It was the smell of something for which he had no name: the smell of It, crouched and lurking and ready to spring. A creature which would eat anything but which was especially hungry for boymeat.

He had opened the door that morning and had groped interminably for the switch, holding the jamb in his usual deathgrip, his eyes squinched shut, the tip of his tongue poked from the corner of his mouth like an agonized rootlet searching for water in a place of drought. Funny? Sure! You betcha! Look at you, Jeongguk! Jeongguk's scared of the dark! What a baby! The sound of the piano came from what his father called the living room and what his mother called the parlor. It sounded like music from another world, far away, the way talk and laughter on a summer-crowded beach must sound to an exhausted swimmer who struggles with the undertow.

His fingers found the switch! Ah!

They snapped it-and nothing. No light.

Oh, cripes! The power!

Jeongguk snatched his arm back as if from a basket filled with snakes. He stepped back from the open cellar door, his heart hurrying in his chest. The power was out, of course-he had forgotten the power was out. Jeezly-crow! What now? Go back and tell Taehyung he couldn't get the box of paraffin because the power was out and he was afraid that something might get him as he stood on the cellar stairs, something that wasn't a Commie or a mass murderer but a creature much worse than either? That it would simply slither part of its rotted self up between the stair risers and grab his ankle? That would go over big, wouldn't it? Others might laugh at such a fancy, but Taehyung wouldn't laugh. Taehyung would be mad. Taehyung would say, "Grow up, Jeongguk... do you want this boat or not?"

As if this thought were his cue, Taehyung called from his bedroom: "did you d-d-die out there, Jeo-Jeongguk?"

"No, I'm gettin it, Tae," Jeonggukcalled back at once. He rubbed at his arms, trying to make the guilty gooseflesh disappear and be smooth skin again. "I just stopped to get a drink of water."

"Well, h-hurry up!"

So he walked down the four steps to the cellar shelf, his heart a warm, beating hammer in his throat, the hair on the nape of his neck standing at attention, his eyes hot, his hands cold, sure that at any moment the cellar door would swing shut on its own, closing off the white light falling through the kitchen windows, and then he would hear It, something worse than all the Commies and murderers in the world, worse than the Japs, worse than Attila the Hun, worse than the somethings in a hundred horror movies. It, growling deeply-he would hear the growl in those lunatic seconds before it pounced on him and unzipped his guts.

The cellar-smell was worse than ever today, because of the flood. Their house was high on Danwon-ro, near the crest of the hill, and they had escaped the worst of it, but there was still standing water down there that had seeped in through the old rock foundations. The smell was low and unpleasant, making you want to take only the shallowest breaths.

Jeongguk sifted through the junk on the shelf as fast as he could-old cans of Kiwi shoepolish and shoepolish rags, a broken kerosene lamp, two mostly empty bottles of Windex, an old flat can of Turtle wax. For some reason this can struck him, and he spent nearly thirty seconds looking at the turtle on the lid with a kind of hypnotic wonder. Then he tossed it back... and here it was at last, a square box with the word GULF on it.

Jeongguk snatched it and ran up the stairs as fast as he could, suddenly aware that his shirttail was out and suddenly sure that his shirttail would be his undoing: the thing in the cellar would allow him to get almost all the way out, and then it would grab the tail of his shirt and snatch him back and -

He reached the kitchen and swept the door shut behind him. It banged gustily. He leaned back against it with his eyes closed, sweat popped out on his arms and forehead, the box of paraffin gripped tightly in one hand.

The piano had come to a stop, and his mom's voice floated to him: "Jeongguk, can't you slam that door a little harder next time? Maybe you could break some of the plates in the Welsh dresser, if you really tried."

"Sorry, Mom," he called back.

"Guk, you waste," Taehyung said from his bedroom. He pitched his voice low so their mother would not hear.

Jeongguk snickered a little. His fear was already gone; it had slipped away from him as easily as a nightmare slips away from a man who awakes, cold-skinned and gasping, from its grip; who feels his body and stares at his surroundings to make sure that none of it ever happened and who then begins at once to forget it. Half is gone by the time his feet hit the floor; three-quarters of it by the time he emerges from the shower and begins to towel off; all of it by the time he finishes his breakfast. All gone... until the next time, when, in the grip of the nightmare, all fears will be remembered.

That turtle, Jeongguk thought, going to the counter drawer where the matches were kept. Where did I see a turtle like that before?

But no answer came, and he dismissed the question.

He got a pack of matches from the drawer, a knife from the rack (holding the sharp edge studiously away from his body, as his dad had taught him), and a small bowl from the Welsh dresser in the dining room. Then he went back into Taehyung's room.

"W-What an a-hole you are, G-Guk," Taehyung said, amiably enough, and pushed back some of the sick-stuff on his nighttable: an empty glass, a pitcher of water, Kleenex, books, a bottle of Vicks VapoRub-the smell of which Taehyung would associate all his life with thick, phlegmy chests and snotty noses. The old Philco radio was there, too, playing not Chopin or Bach but a Little Richard tune... very softly, however, so softly that Little Richard was robbed of all his raw and elemental power. Their mother, who had studied classical piano at Juilliard, hated rock and roll. She did not merely dislike it; she abominated it.

"I'm no a-hole," Jeongguk said, sitting on the edge of Taehyung's bed and putting the things he had gathered on the nighttable.

"Yes you are," Taehyung said. "Nothing but a great big brown a-hole, that's you."

Jeongguk tried to imagine a kid who was nothing but a great big a-hole on legs and began to giggle.

"Your a-hole is bigger than Seoul," Taehyung said, beginning to giggle, too.


End file.
